Branching in VSTS

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So, we are trying to set up VSTS for our development team, and watching the recent tech conference videos, it suggests using branches.... A Development branch, a Main Branch (essentially your QA) and a Release Branch. After many internal discussions we are still at a loss as to what is the best way to use Branching within our team. So my question to the community is... "How are you using Branching with VSTS within your D365 for Ops projects and why have you chosen to implement in this way?"

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Martin Dráb 237,948 Most Valuable Professional on at

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I'll move to your question to the Dynamics AX forum, because nobody understands what administrators meant by the forum called "Dynamics 365, Enterprise Edition" and just few people use it. Also, experience of users of Dynamics AX are very relevant, because it's still the same product (renaming it to Dynamics 365 for Operations doesn't change anything about how you can use branches in VSTS).

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Martin Dráb 237,948 Most Valuable Professional on at

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There are many possible branching strategies (see Branching strategies with TFVC, for example) and none if best in all situations.

In general, you want just such a number of branches you need for isolation and no more, because extra branches means wasting time with extra merging. For example, if you make no changes in the release branch, so there is no concurrent development with the main branch, do you really need the release branch? The right answer is "it depends", but it's important to realize that you can postpone creating a branch until you really need it.

I also sometimes create branches ad-hoc when we need to develop some intrusive prototype or a large piece of functionality that doesn't fit well into the release cycle. Then I destroy the branch when it's not needed anymore.

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Hello,

is there any instructions how to setup dev box to work with multiple branches? Or I have to have separately dev box for each branch? If yes how i can do merge of branches? If is it possible to use one dev box to multiple branches, what i will see in AOT? I would like to see AOT for selected branch.

Thanks

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Martin Dráb 237,948 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Using branches means that you can have several parallel versions of the packages folder in VSTS, not that you can load several parallel version to Visual Studio and working with them at once. You always work just with one branch at a time.

The most straightforward approach is changing the workspace mapping to point to another branch and synchronizing your local packages directory with the selected branch.

Because this takes time and you must rebuild the application after the switch, you may want to have several packages directories (one for each branch) and possibly databases too and reconfiguring AX and VS if you want to switch to another branch.

If you regularly work in several branches in parallel, having separate development boxes is easier and more convenient.

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Don Shields 650 on at

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Martin, Helpful information. I know this is an old post but I'm looking for guidance in the actual mapping of the newly created branch. The existing main branch is mapped to K:\AOSService\PackagesLocalDirectory like usual. If I create a branch under Trunk where will I map the branch metadata to?

Thanks,

Don

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nmaenpaa 101,160 Moderator on at

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You will map the dev vm with one branch only. If you want to develop against myBranch, map it to K:\AOSService\PackagesLocalDirectory . And do not map Trunk/Main at all.

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Don Shields 650 on at

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In my scenario Main is already a branch and mapped to the indicated location. If I right click Main I have the option to Branch. After I create a branch do I need to un map main and re-map to the new branch. I don't currently have a dev vm to test this.

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nmaenpaa 101,160 Moderator on at

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Basically yes. Martin's post contained other possibilities, too, but anyway on one machine you can work with only one branch at a time, and changing between branches consumes time and requires work.

If your current devbox is mapped to Main branch, maybe you should use another machine to work with your other branch. You will anyway need to work against Main branch when you merge your code there for deployment (assuming you use Main for deployment). So why not have two machines - it's the easiest solution.

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Don Shields 650 on at

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Thanks for the helpful feedback. That sounds like a good idea. Most of the time we have at least two dev machines per client anyway.

Don

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